


Always Yes

by Largay



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Crystal Gems (Steven Universe), Angst, F/F, F/M, Human AU, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-23 04:03:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17676113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Largay/pseuds/Largay
Summary: You've heard this story before. Someone asks: if you could go back and relive the life you had, would you? Knowing what you know now, having the the confidence that took three decades to earn; what would you change?Well this is that story. But it's not a happy one. Magic and love aren't the answer. Science and regret take the wheel. And now, their is so much to tell with so little time.My name is Peridot, and this? This is my answer to that question.Yes.Always yes.





	1. Prologue

You've heard this story before. Someone asks: if you could go back and relive the life you had, would you? Knowing what you know now, having the the confidence that took three decades to earn; what would  _ you _ change?   
  
Well this is that story. But it's not a happy one. Magic and love aren't the answer. Science and regret take the wheel. And now, their is so much to tell with so little time.   
  
My name is Peridot, and this? This is my answer to that question.    
  
Yes.    
  
Always yes.   
  
_   
  
Here I was again, alone, on a Saturday night. No real friends to call and no where I really wanted to be.    
  
I never really minded those standard nights before. I always enjoyed the solitude with my work. Tinkering and fine tuning my machines until the early hours of the morning. The joy of creation enough to repress any inkling urge for human interaction.    
  
However, that night.. was different. 

 

My thoughts then where anything but distracted by metal and wires. Instead I couldn't get  _ her _ face out of my head and after the tenth time catching myself in my head, I sighed and lifted myself from my work bench.

 

I looked down at my desk at the small hobby build I had started ages ago: a mid size dog robot. Near its completion now save for the final aesthetic touches and the installation of its AI, it did clearly look like a badass robo dog now after over a year of work. Modeled after a Corgi it was a cute creation as well despite it's metal exterior and lifeless eyes. 

 

I gave my creation a soft smile, almost capturing the happiness I had felt over the past month seeing him finally come together. But I again felt the sinking of my gut as she again passed through my mind and I had to shut my eyes tightly at the stab of pain that lanced through my heart.

 

_ It was never supposed to be like this.  _

 

The image of sunken eyes and bruised arms flashing quickly through my head brought another shot of pain.

 

_ “.. Peridot?”  _

 

My eyes shot open at the memory of hearing my name with a voice I thought I'd never hear again. The voice that had captivated me in my teenage youth.

 

I shook my head to clear the memory away, pushing away from my desk and my work. 

 

_ There isn't any use thinking of her now. You can't save her. You lost that chance.  _

 

I turned and looked around at my small studio apartment, dark except for the weak light shining from the lamp on my desk. A kitchenette directly across the room from the desk. An old lavender couch in the middle of the room facing where I had stood. A TV in the corner set at top a small entertainment center and tiny window facing out towards the wall of the apartment next door. There were clothes scattered around in small piles and gadgetry pushed into unused corners. 

 

It wasn't much. Small and messy, just like the owner, me. I took a look at my child like smudged hands and down at my wrinkled clothes, long over do for a wash, on my tiny frame. I then reached up, pushed the unkempt short blonde hair from my face and took off my over-sized round glasses to rub my tired eyes. 

 

And there she was again, in my mind's eye. Now the beautiful girl I remembered from over a decade before, her name effortlessly forming on my lips in a whisper.

 

“Lapis..” 

 

The image was so clear then. 

 

_ Her walking nonchalantly through a school hallway, newly dyed dark blue hair glistening in the crap school lighting. Brown Hazel eyes half lidded from maybe not getting enough sleep the night before. Sun tanned skin soft and youthful still, untouched by adult problems.  _

 

_ I could hear the memory too. The sound of her laughter cutting through the school noise, the name calling from my bullies, the hundreds of feet stomping going to class, stealing my breath away. _

 

That's when I first saw her. 

 

_ “Hey loser!” A shove forced my eyes away from her and back to the behemoth of a girl in front of me just in time to register the fist coming towards my face- _

  
  


That was bully numero uno. The big old Jasper herself. She tormented me in every way she could think of almost on a daily basis in those days until I finally escaped high school upon graduation. Unfortunately I didn't have good enough grades for a full ride to college when I was done, so I worked part time at a local electronics store while doing my associates at the local community college. 

 

That's when I officially met Lapis Lazuli. 

 

_ She walked into the store on a slow day, all the beauty and still shimmering blue hair as I had remembered it as a highs chool freshman, if not a little more filled out in all the right places. I couldn’t help but stare with my wide bright green eyes. Wearing a light blue crop top, jean shorts and.. What were they called again? Gladiator sandals I think.. Well she looked stunning in that moment and the giggle that escaped her lips at catching me gaping really shouldn't have had that foot to the gas pedal effect on my poor weak heart.  _

 

_ But it did and I must have looked like a tomato with the searing blush I felt on my face. ‘Great. Nerdy Peridot caught still being weird even after high school..’ Is what went through my mind, attempting to put on my customer service act as she walked up to the counter, I just hoped she wouldn't recognize me as the girl with the perpetual black eye from school. _

 

_ “H-hello and welcome. How may I assist you toda-” _

 

_ “Peridot? Its been ages.” She said with another laugh. “..and of course she would recognize and remember my name.”  _

 

_ “O-oh Lapis! I almost didn't recognize you. Y-you look radiant.” ‘..did i seriously just say that?’  I face palm internally but she just smirks with a raised eyebrow and responds with “Thanks, you’re looking pretty good there yourself.”  _

 

_ If I could have gotten any redder in the face than I already was I would have fainted with all the blood rushing to my head. _

 

I couldn’t help but laugh then, my minds eye back in my dingy apartment.  _ I was such a useless lesbian back then. If only I could be as innocent and naive as I was then haha.. _

 

The interaction that day should have ended with me just fixing her phone like she had come in for, but it didn't. We got talking about where life had taken us in the year since high school. She was going to the same community college for her art degree, me for engineering. Her favorite color was blue (obviously) and somehow it came up that she was just out of a relationship and single. It somehow also came up that she was very very gay and also wanted to get coffee with me, nerdy Peridot, the next day. 

  
  
  


I really didn't want to think about all that. All of this had been so many years ago now. I had stopped thinking about it because of the ache I was feeling just then whenever she crossed my mind.

 

But how could I stop those thoughts? Seeing her again after so long.. In that state? 

 

What happened?

 

I laughed in the dim light of my small crummy apartment. Who was I kidding after all? I knew what happened. 

 

Or more like, who happened.

 

It was Jasper. Ruining every good thing in my life just as she always did even back then. Ruining Lapis just because she could. 

 

Because I wasn't strong enough to fight for her.

 

I reached up roughly wiping the tired tears that slowly creeped their way down my face, and walked quickly to my fridge to reach above it for the bottle of dark tequila and a shot glass sitting on top. 

 

_ Nothing like tequila to numb the brain for awhile.. _


	2. Of Water & Data Mining

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peridot gets some work done.

I woke the next day with a dull pain behind my eyes. Too much tequila and me just a tad too old to be drinking like a twenty one year old. Not that drinking had been a habit back then. That came much later.

 

I forced my eyes open against the small bit of sunlight leaking into the room from my tiny window, feeling as though I was fighting against gorilla glue on my eyelashes. I tried to blink the gunk away and groaned as I lifted myself up to sit on the couch that was also my bed. Feeling around for my phone in the cushions for a moment, I finally fished it out and turned the screen on. It was about to die at 3% but I can see that it's past twelve in the afternoon along with an email from my most recent client. 

 

_ Probably should finish that project today.. _

 

I rub my face with a sluggish hand, stand on unbalanced legs to put some coffee on and plug the phone in before it completely dies. Leaning over the kitchen sink to wash the gunk from my eyes and rinse the cotton feel from my mouth, I make the pointed decision to not think of anything but my work for the next few hours. 

 

_ No thoughts of the past today.. Just me and my work.  _

 

-

 

I had become a pretty good.. “programmer” since my college days and I had quite a few regular clients. Ones who paid well for a good product and discretion. I didn’t get jobs often enough to be rich but it was enough to pay the bills and fund my true passion for robotics.

 

I didn't have any real info on this most recent client other than what they wanted from me but that was the norm with a lot of these types. It was safer to keep their cards close to their chest and let someone else do the dirty work. 

 

That someone being me.

 

The job was simple: hack into Diamond Corp. new technologies databases, locate and retrieve the data the client needed, and then leave trace evidence of the hack having been done by one of their competitors, OC Tech. 

 

Simple, yes, but also risky. Diamond wasn’t like the small time businesses I was usually paid to deal with. No, Diamond was a global entity with an amazing cyber security team who probably dealt with cyber threats on daily bases. No ordinary hacker could force their way into their systems and get away with it, much less even be willing to take the chance.

 

But if this story was about a boring run of the mill nobody hacker, you wouldn’t be reading this right now would you? I may not have had the best grades in school when it came to writing and history, but who needs that garbage anyway when you were tech genius prodigy? 

 

I was good at what I did, my clients knew it and this newest one was no exception. Of course a job like this would cost much more than the average hack, but whoever was funding the buyer here must have had deep pockets with the amount being offered up. Lets just say, I wouldn't have to work for quite awhile once this job was complete.

 

So once the first payment of two was confirmed (one before and one after the job was complete) I sat on the couch with my coffee and laptop and got to work.

 

-

 

_ This has to be a joke. _

 

Having made quick work of getting into Diamond Corp.’s systems, it took quite a bit longer to actually get passed all the surface level data. Bank account numbers and social security numbers probably should not have been that easy to get access to.. But lucky for Diamond employees, that wasn't what this client was after. 

 

Not that I would have gone that far for a client. I had refused many jobs with those intents before. I knew I couldn’t stomach the thought of essentially being involved in destroying the lives of innocent employees just trying to get by. I’d have been in a much nicer apartment if I accepted the kinda money those jobs offered. 

 

So no, I wasn’t currently laughing at how easily I could access sensitive employee information, but at the name of one of the hidden projects Diamond was funding.

 

_ “TIME AND SPACE MANIPULATION PROJECT- BETA 1.2” _

 

_ This can’t be a serious project.  _

 

I scoffed thinking this had to be some cover title for some other project, but the idea was so absurd that I couldn’t help but click through the documents and as I continued to skim through what was there, as ridiculous as the idea was, Diamond seemed to seriously be experimenting with the idea of time travel. 

 

“But this is impossible..” I said the words out loud but the more I read and the more I ran the calculations I’d found through my head, I questioned how sure I was of that. 

 

In a spur of the moment decision, I duplicated the documents and saved them to my personal drive. The science was there and the topic too interesting to not look further into. And at the end of the day, I was still very much the dorky science nerd I was back in high school.

 

_ And hey, maybe this will be another thing to keep me busy later.. Even if this does end up being as preposterous as I originally thought. _

 

With that put to the side for now, I went back to the work.

 

-

 

_ It was dark.  _

 

_ Suffocating. _

 

_ Water. _

 

_ Water was filling my lungs with every breath I tried to take. The pain was excruciating. The burn of salt in my mouth felt like jagged blades tearing through my throat. I struggled and tried to swim in panic but I didn't know which way was up. _

 

_ I reached out in every direction, trying to find any way to save myself, when my hands found a something soft and solid in front of me. I blinked trying to see what it was that I held in my hands, desperate for some escape.  _

 

_ Suddenly light flashed before my eyes in a blinding burst and I let go in surprise, shutting my eyes from it.  _

 

_ When I could open my eyes fully again I saw Lapis. Glowing and blue. Appearing almost angelic with her eyes closed, almost as if asleep, hair flowing softly around her head with the push and pull of ocean water. Unable to comprehend the image in front of me I swam closer to her, forgetting that I should have passed out from the lack of air by then.  _

 

_ When I reached for her again, just as I was about to touch her face, her eyes shot open wide and scared and then-  _

 

I shot up from the couch, falling over on my hands and knees, gasping for breath as if I really had been drowning in the ocean. Drenched in sweat and shaking, I came back to reality. 

 

It had been just a dream. 

 

“Fuck” I said to no one in my sad lonely room. Not even sleep could let me escape my guilt. I had been distracted enough by my work during the day but there wasn't really avoiding it. The image of her too fresh and new to completely forget it.

 

I sat up leaning my back on the couch with a knee curled up to my chest, still getting my breath back. Looking to the side and out the window, I could see it was dark still, meaning not much time could have passed since I dozed off.

 

Looking around and finding my glasses, I quickly put those on and grabbed my phone to check my notifications. 

 

**‘Payment Received’**

 

That was good at least. The client must have been happy with my results of my little ‘investigation’. Now I wouldn’t have to worry about work for a while judging by the amount of zeros in the payment sum. Thinking about that brought back thoughts of the files I had saved to look at later. 

 

Maybe some far fetched ideas about being Marty McFly with a time traveling DeLorean would do the trick for distraction.

 

At least that thought got a small laugh out of me.

 

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone who commented last chapter. Definitely helped getting an idea for everyone's interest. I'm gonna try my best to make a good story but I'm an EMT not a writer so wish me luck lol.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is my first fanfic in ages. I hope yall like this first chapter. I promise this is gonna be different from what you usually see for lapidot, so let me know what yall think so far.


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